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The bestselling author of This Is Where I Leave You returns with a hilarious and heart-rending tale about one familiy's struggle to reconnect.

“Mistakes have been made.” Drew Silver has begun to accept that life isn’t going to turn out as he expected. His fleeting fame as the drummer for a one-hit wonder rock band is nearly a decade behind him. His ex-wife is about to marry a terrific guy. And his Princeton-bound teenage daughter Casey has just confided in him that she’s pregnant—because Silver is the one she cares least about letting down.

So when Silver learns that he requires emergency life-saving heart surgery, he makes the radical decision to refuse the operation, choosing instead to spend what time he has left to repair his relationship with Casey, become a better man, and live in the moment—even if that moment isn’t going to last very long. As his exasperated family looks on, Silver grapples with the ultimate question of whether or not his own life is worth saving.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Tropper’s characters are likably zany and fallible, and perhaps more important, funny. One Last Thing Before I Go is a poignant story about facing death and celebrating life, even when things seem well beyond repair." --Newsweek/The Daily Beast on One Last Thing Before I Go

"The richly talented Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) has created an acerbic, middle-aged lost soul who will ultimately illuminate the reasons we stick around on this lopsided planet despite significant temptation to let it go. Readers will love Silver and want to throttle him in equal measure. Eminently quotable, hilariously funny, and emotionally draining, this arresting tour de force will entertain well after the book is done." -Library Journal (starred review) on One Last Thing Before I Go

“…a bristling, witty tale of woe that'll make you appreciate whatever good things, no matter how few, have come your way.” –Entertainment Weekly on One Last Thing Before I Go

About the Author

Jonathan Tropper is the New York Times bestselling author of five previous novels; Plan B, The Book of Joe, Everything Changes, How To Talk to a Widower, and This Is Where I Leave You. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. He is also a screenwriter, and the co-creator and executive producer of the HBO/Cinemax television show Banshee (produced by Alan Ball), premiering in 2013.

More About the Author

Jonathan Tropper is the author of How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, The Book of Joe, and Plan B. He lives with his family in Westchester, New York, where he teaches writing at Manhattanville College.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

Silver is forty-four, a former drummer with the one-hit-wonder band, The Bent Daisies. After the front man/vocalist, Pat Mcreedy, left them and went solo, they tanked, dried up, and disbanded. Now Silver is a notch above broke, and his ex-wife, Denise, is about to get married to the doctor who wants to perform life-saving surgery on him. But Silver is about the most passively suicidal guy you may meet in fiction.

Barely scraping by, Silver lives on his royalty checks from the song, "Rest in Pieces," or plays Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, when he can get a gig. Mcreedy's career is epic and glitzy, and he sleeps with sexy celebrities. Silver hangs out with a group of losers in the tatty Versailles apartments, where they scope out young daisies in bikinis and nod off at the pool. In between, they make weekly deposits at the sperm bank to supplement their income.

Tropper has a knack for combining flippant with rueful to achieve sharp and piercing. His leading men are Jewish, middle-aged, overweight, and emotionally adolescent. This book and the last one--This is Where I Leave You-- have titles that underscore absence, departing, and abandonment. There's as much death cloud as sex haze in the atmosphere. But there's at least one compelling reason to keep Silver onward through the fog. Or is there?

The only person who seems to need Silver right now is his eighteen-year-old daughter, Casey. But only because she's afraid of disappointing her mother with the news that she's pregnant. So she tells her dad, whom she sometimes calls Dad, but often calls Silver. She's a combination of spiky and vulnerable, and her presence makes you root for Silver to wake up from his numbed slumber and be the strong and able support that she needs.Read more ›

If you liked Tropper's past novels (as I do) then you'll find this most recent offering enjoyable for the same reasons: quirky characters, moments of real insight, twisty plot lines and deftly constructed emotional set pieces. The dialogue sparkles, even as all the characters draw you to their own distinct world views.

In short, here's another romantic comedy that's missing only the production notes and studio backing. Get me Julia Roberts and Albert Brooks on the phone! But I'm really alright with that. A novel that reads like a movie is usually a sign of a tightly written, dialogue-rich, marvelously descriptive work. It's also indicative of a great beach book.

Light weight? Maybe. But to my mind it's really quite OK to be a writer of fiction who tells an interesting tale really well. My only problem this time out is I never buy the central premise: that the main character is diagnosed with a condition that will kill him if he doesn't get surgery and he decides not to have the surgery. I just don't believe him. He tries to convince the reader and every other character in the book that he's serious. None of us are buying it.

Does he live or die? Buy the book and find out. In the end, I find myself enjoying the journey and caring little for the destination.

This book has some shining moments, even some laugh out loud moments. But my book club noticed that the characters have fairly glaring inconsistencies. Denise's mother dies at 13, but then is helping her try on wedding dresses. Her dad dies and then magically appears at her 2nd wedding. Did anybody else notice this? Is it only my Kindle version that is screwy? This were bothersome, and overall the book was just okay for me.

Among Jonathan Tropper's many gifts is the ability to make his readers care about passive male protagonists who have no business being liked. In THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU, Tropper's rude 2009 novel, the recently divorced Judd Foxman rarely loses his browbeaten look as he and the rest of his family sit shiva for his deceased father. When Judd gets angry, his reactions are extreme, such as when he catches his wife having sex with his shock-jock radio boss. Otherwise, he's content to remain detached and toss off mordant wisecracks. Yet, we like Judd despite his sarcasm and moments of cruelty. He may not get along with all the members of his family, but even someone as jaded as him recognizes the importance of love and forgiveness after a death in the family gives them definable features.

Tropper pulls off the same trick in his newest novel, ONE LAST THING BEFORE I GO. This time, the divorced protagonist with the perpetual hangdog expression is Drew Silver. When Silver was in his 20s, he was the drummer for a rock band called The Bent Daisies. They were a one-hit wonder, but that one hit was so huge that the lead singer decided to leave the band for a solo career. The remaining band members were left to pursue lives of relative anonymity. Silver, now 44 and a tinnitus sufferer, makes his money these days by playing weddings, collecting royalty checks and, once a week, donating sperm to a local fertility clinic.

He lives at the Versailles, an apartment complex off the interstate and home mainly to divorced, middle-aged men. His ex-wife, Denise, is a week away from marrying Rich Hastings, a respected surgeon. Even more dispiriting to Silver is a visit he receives from his 18-year-old daughter, Casey.Read more ›